Hate Your Mobile Carrier? Trade For A New One.

10 Nov 2006

I know I've mentioned CellTrade USA in the past. The basic idea is: you're trading contracts (and mobile phones) with someone else who is unsatisfied with their service/contract for some reason. You get the benefit of "switching carriers" without the early termination fees, though I'm sure CellTrade gets its fee for brokering the deal.

Given that my mobile phones are paid for by my employer or, in my wife's case, prepaid, it's not a particularly interesting service for me. However, I figure I am the exception rather than the norm. One of my readers passed along this success story on the service that I figured I'd pass along.

After reading that article I called my provider which was 'Verizon Wireless' at the time to tell them that I had no service in my new town "Hoboken" in New Jersey they told me that I was still in a contract because they had service in NJ just not in my town 'lol'.

As per the above article… I decided to give celltradeusa.com a try. In short it did work. After a couple of days I found a couple people interested in my contract. 2 of the 3 didn't pass credit with Verizon but the 3rd person did. Verizon told me that I was lucky because a couple of months ago the transfer process was through the mail only and took 2-3 weeks to complete. They said the recently converted to over the phone transfers and it was done in 20 minutes. Everything is A OK now…I got out of my contract and switched to tmobile. I used the site to take over a tmobile contract with 4 months left. This women gave me her razor,car charger,leather case and and her bluetooth ha and left a $25 credit on my bill… I made out like a bandit . She told me that when I was done she was going to take over a treo contract on Sprint from someone on celltrade Just thought I would share my experience.

I'm sure people outside the US/Canada probably think it's crazy to even be under contract. Unfortunately, pretty much every carrier here requires at least a one year contract–even if you bring your own phone–and they really want you to sign a two year one. I hear that Rogers in Canada offers three year contracts.